Vienna Apache Kafka® Meetup by Confluent

Join us for an Apache Kafka® meetup on Monday, Nov 17th from 5:30pm hosted by Austrian Post AG!

Not an official dress code, but if you're in the mood to bring a "nice" christmas jumper it would be nice!

📍Venue:
Austrian Post AG
Rochusplatz 1
1030 Vienna

🗓 Agenda:

• 5:30pm: Doors open
• 5:30pm – 6:00pm: Drinks and networking
• 6:00pm - 6:45pm: Picking the right flavour of Apache Kafka
• 6:45pm - 7:30pm: How Many Topics Is Too Many? Kafka Lessons from Order Management at Scale
• 7:30pm - 9:00pm: Additional Q&A, Snacks and Networking

💡 Speaker One:
Patrik Kleindl, Bearing Point

Title of Talk:
Picking the right flavour of Apache Kafka

Abstract:
Beyond the convenient commoditized availability of open-source software lies a problem space that most software engineers avoid like the plague and most architects know to be a rabbithole full of often non-technical challenges: Deciding for or against buying instead of building, and getting the whole process to the finishing line.
Having helped some customers through the choices of comparing and purchasing solutions based on Apache Kafka the talk will give an overview of how the decision can be narrowed down based on a set of common requirements.

Bio:
More than half of my life has been spent in technology consulting and solution architecture, across very different industries, customers and projects. I gravitate towards socio-technical challenges, but also know that many companies require a helpful push before they can adapt new technologies like Apache Kafka, which I had the luck to be introduced to 7 years ago, still extending and using my skills around it.
Disclaimer: BearingPoint is a Partner of Confluent, but we consult and implement based on what best fits the customers' needs, not the next quarterly sales goal.

💡Speaker Two:
Hannes Bösch, CEO, Posedio & Damjan Gjurovski, CEO/CTO, Posedio

Title of Talk:
How Many Topics Is Too Many? Kafka Lessons from Order Management at Scale

Abstract:
When building a modern order management system in the cloud, event-driven architectures and asynchronous processing quickly become unavoidable. With microservices, the advice often sounds deceptively simple: “Create a topic for every event,” “Keep them small,” “Make it elegant.” But what happens when you follow those rules?
In this talk, we’ll share the hard-earned lessons from designing and operating an event-driven order management system at scale where we discovered that the “elegant” approach can sometimes lead to surprising complexity, hidden coupling, and operational pain. You’ll hear about the real-world consequences of topic design decisions, how message schema composition affects resilience and clarity, and what we learned from an experiment we never quite meant to run.
Whether you’re just starting your Kafka journey or are already deep in production, this session will give you practical insights into structuring topics, managing event evolution, and keeping your architecture understandable as it grows.

Bios:
Hannes is the CEO of Posedio, a company specializing in cloud-native development, with a solid foundation in software engineering. He is deeply passionate about cloud-native computing, distributed systems, and software architecture patterns. In his current consulting role, Hannes worked as the solution architect on a large-scale project involving 11 development teams. During this time, he gained valuable insights into the complexities and pitfalls of building intricate choreographies with microservices.
Damjan is the CEO/CTO of Posedio and has worked with some of the biggest Austrian companies and service providers in the retail, education and finance sector. He enjoys working with new, open- source cloud technologies with focus on security and scalability.